How Trump Has Changed, With Maggie Haberman
Episode
58 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Personal Finance, Crypto & Web3, Psychology & Behavior
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Trump's Iran decision-making: Netanyahu visited the Situation Room on February 11 and presented a regime change scenario including a video of potential successors. Trump's own CIA director called it farcical and Rubio called it bullshit, yet Trump approved military objectives anyway, driven by years of personal grievance over assassination plots and the 2024 campaign hack attributed to Iran.
- ✓Information control in Trump 2.0: Trump's reality is shaped almost entirely by Natalie Harp, nicknamed "the human printer," who supplies positive news printouts and fan mail. Aides fear delivering bad news. Fox News is measurably less critical this term than last. When economic advisers presented trade data pre-Liberation Day, Trump rejected their numbers and had Harp Google alternatives in real time.
- ✓Why corruption accountability fails structurally: Inspectors general were fired on day one without the legally required 30-day congressional notice. The House GOP functions as an arm of the administration rather than an oversight body. With pardon power, Supreme Court immunity rulings, and an attorney general unlikely to enforce contempt subpoenas, the traditional congressional-media-DOJ accountability sequence cannot activate.
- ✓Trump's decision process runs on spectacle, not process: The interagency National Security Council process has effectively ceased. Meetings are borderless — Laura Loomer walked in with a firing list during Liberation Day discussions; Congressman Scott Perry joined mid-meeting with separate demands. Trump absorbs information visually through TV-style montages, including cable news clips used to evaluate cabinet appointees before selection.
- ✓Self-dealing has reached structurally unprecedented scale: Trump is generating personal liquid wealth from a crypto company his sons run alongside the sons of his special envoy, an industry he directly regulates. His team is now attempting to sell $100,000 subscriptions for advance notice of Truth Social posts, which demonstrably move markets — a monetization of presidential speech with no legal barrier given presidents face fewer ethics rules than staff.
What It Covers
Maggie Haberman, co-author of *Regime Change*, analyzes Donald Trump's second term with Ezra Klein, covering the Iran war's origins, Trump's information environment, the collapse of DOGE, unprecedented self-dealing through crypto and Truth Social monetization, and why traditional accountability mechanisms have stopped functioning against this administration.
Key Questions Answered
- •Trump's Iran decision-making: Netanyahu visited the Situation Room on February 11 and presented a regime change scenario including a video of potential successors. Trump's own CIA director called it farcical and Rubio called it bullshit, yet Trump approved military objectives anyway, driven by years of personal grievance over assassination plots and the 2024 campaign hack attributed to Iran.
- •Information control in Trump 2.0: Trump's reality is shaped almost entirely by Natalie Harp, nicknamed "the human printer," who supplies positive news printouts and fan mail. Aides fear delivering bad news. Fox News is measurably less critical this term than last. When economic advisers presented trade data pre-Liberation Day, Trump rejected their numbers and had Harp Google alternatives in real time.
- •Why corruption accountability fails structurally: Inspectors general were fired on day one without the legally required 30-day congressional notice. The House GOP functions as an arm of the administration rather than an oversight body. With pardon power, Supreme Court immunity rulings, and an attorney general unlikely to enforce contempt subpoenas, the traditional congressional-media-DOJ accountability sequence cannot activate.
- •Trump's decision process runs on spectacle, not process: The interagency National Security Council process has effectively ceased. Meetings are borderless — Laura Loomer walked in with a firing list during Liberation Day discussions; Congressman Scott Perry joined mid-meeting with separate demands. Trump absorbs information visually through TV-style montages, including cable news clips used to evaluate cabinet appointees before selection.
- •Self-dealing has reached structurally unprecedented scale: Trump is generating personal liquid wealth from a crypto company his sons run alongside the sons of his special envoy, an industry he directly regulates. His team is now attempting to sell $100,000 subscriptions for advance notice of Truth Social posts, which demonstrably move markets — a monetization of presidential speech with no legal barrier given presidents face fewer ethics rules than staff.
Notable Moment
During a meeting with foreign leaders, Trump interrupted proceedings to call French President Macron and ask detailed questions about the Arc de Triomphe — visitor numbers, whether people jump from it — while planning his own presidential arch, which he confirmed to a CBS reporter is explicitly a monument to himself.
Episode Transcript
This break is brought to you by Adobe Creative Cloud, the ultimate creative toolkit. With over 20 apps at your fingertips, there are always new ways to explore your creativity. Transform images with Photoshop, design graphics with Illustrator, edit videos with Premiere Pro, or animate just about anything. No matter what you want to create, Adobe has the tools you need to bring your ideas to life. It's all in Creative Cloud. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent at the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the co author alongside Jonathan Swan of Regime Change. I would say the single best book on the first fourteen months of Donald Trump's second term. She joins me now. Maggie Haberman, welcome back to the show. Ezra, thank you for having me. So I wanna talk about the experience I had reading the book, which is remembering how much energy and ferocity there was in the first six to eight months of the Trump administration. Right. And then knowing how many of the things that you all were tracking here, from the terrorists to those to parts of society bending the knee to Trump to the Iran war Mhmm. I now feel like they have, like, deeply run out of some kind of steam, or they've ended up trapping the Trump administration in its own decisions. This This book is really about Trump's year one, mostly. What does year two feel like to you? First of all, thank you for having me. And I wish Jonathan were here, but, his wife is having a baby soon. So and I have permission to say that. So, there's a reason that the first section of the book is called Whirlwind. And I was thinking as you were talking about the running out of steam piece, I would put it a little differently. I think it's not black and white. And Elon Musk is obviously not working for the government anymore. I I do think it's remarkable how much of Doge his memory hold. He came in. He was supposed to change the way government was going to work. In reality, Doge didn't do anything close to what it was supposed to do. But it did do things like show show how Trump was going to govern by fiat in large measure. Elon Musk shut down USAID, just shut down an entire congressionally created agency. One of Trump's first unilateral actions was firing a bunch of inspectors general. Did not notify congress, which he's supposed to do, about why, and he was supposed to give Congress a thirty day notice. None of that happened. Stephen Miller, in particular, rolled out with a bunch of executive actions that I would say some of them didn't run out of steam. The ones focused on DEI, in particular. The one about trans women in sports, in particular. And, certainly, a lot of their activities at the border have not. If you were a Trump supporter and …
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Regime ChangeBy guestby Maggie Haberman
“Maggie Haberman, co-author of *Regime Change*, analyzes Donald Trump's second term with Ezra Klein”
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